It’s a sobering thought:

There will be times in your relationship when you don’t feel loved.

Even if it’s a great relationship. Even if you know you’ll be together for a lifetime.

How you handle those periods is critical.

If you panic, you might drive cracks into your relationship.

Luckily, there’s another strategy that works like a charm.

Try it, and enjoy feeling closer than ever.

Why We Panic

For most of us, not feeling loved is a sign that something’s really wrong.

There must be a reason we feel this way…

And the first reason that comes to mind is:

“My partner has stopped loving me.”

No wonder we panic.

And when we panic, we do things that push our partner away.

We anxiously seek reassurance. We develop attention-seeking behavior. We get angry at our partner.

None of those behaviors help.

What does help are two key principles:

Faith and space.

Give love space to bloom, and water that love with faith.

Soon you’ll find those loving feelings returning like blossoms after the rain.

Knowing vs. Feeling

First, let me ask you this:

Do you know he loves you?

There’s a difference between knowing he loves you and feeling he loves you.

Knowing he loves you is a fact. You can look for evidence to support this fact: he’s agreed to be in a relationship with you, he supports you, he’s there for you when you need him.

Feeling loved is an emotion.

Like all emotions, it arises spontaneously in certain situations.

Maybe you feel loved when you’re cuddling on the sofa, or when you’re having a lazy Sunday breakfast, or when you’re walking hand-in-hand.

As anyone who’s tried to make themselves happy knows, it’s hard to make yourself feel a particular emotion on command.

The best you can do is create the kinds of situations that predictably evoke that feeling.

Which leads to my next question:

What are you doing to create the kinds of situations that make you feel loved?

You Have More Power Than You Know

Most of us don’t realize the power we have to make ourselves feel loved.

We think that power lies in our partner’s hands.

We assume that we don’t feel loved because of our partner’s failure to show love. Naturally, the solution must be to get our partner to change.

We decide that our partner needs to start showing us love in the way we want to receive it.

Our partner could be showing us love through acts of service, but we need words of affirmation.

We don’t want our partner to just parrot what we tell them, either. The words must be spontaneous and come from the heart.

Even then, those words might not be enough.

We may have built up so much hurt over time that our partner’s displays of affection are too little too late.

If changing your partner hasn’t worked for you, there’s a simpler way to feel the love you’re craving:

Create the conditions for it to flourish.

Start with Faith

If you know your partner loves you but you don’t feel loved, I want you to start with one simple principle:

Faith.

We don’t talk enough about the importance of faith in relationships.

Not necessarily religious faith, but faith in love.

Faith is the belief in the existence of things unseen.

Even if you don’t see or feel his love at the moment, you can still have faith in it.

Having faith that he loves you keeps you open to all the little ways he’s expressing love that you might otherwise have missed.

Having faith helps you give him the benefit of the doubt when he’s stressed or swamped and emotionally absent.

Faith keeps your belief in your love strong even when you’re going through tough periods and don’t like each other very much.

Make Space for Love

But faith on its own is not enough.

You also have to take action.

Let’s go back to the question I asked earlier.

What does it mean to “create the kinds of situations that make you feel loved”?

Well, we can certainly imagine the kinds of situations that work against love.

When you’re busy, exhausted, and overloaded with a never-ending to do list, you don’t have time for love.

When you get a free moment, you just want to collapse. You want to stare at a screen and not think.

Now imagine that instead you’ve blocked off an entire Sunday to do nothing but hang out together. You sleep in and eat your favorite foods. You sit in the sun and chat. You tease each other and laugh.

Tensions dissolve. You feel a sense of spaciousness around your heart. You’re happy again.

And when you look at him, you see love.

You wonder how you ever could have missed it.

Now, I don’t know what makes you feel loved, but I do know that love thrives on relaxation, enjoyment, and silliness.

If things are too serious or demanding, love goes into hiding.

So have faith in his love and take action to reconnect.

Smile. Laugh. Tease him. Cuddle up. Slow down. Enjoy life. Give your beautiful love space to breathe.